Best Comedy

And then there's Best Comedy. Sure, getting a best comedy award from the Australia Tumbleweeds is kind of like getting a community service award from Pol Pot, but at least you know it's not being handed out simply to support the industry. And how many Australian awards can say that?

BEST COMEDY
A Nest Of Occcasionals by Tony Martin - 38.10%
"EPIC."
- Denbigh
"Martin's party trick - recounting childhood banalities with a self-mocking adult erudition - is something I could happily enjoy forever. Almost every sentence in this is funny, but what else would you expect from a Chip-ite?"
- Mike S
"An absolute diamond. On the one hand I curse the fact that Tony Martin isn't well-known to UK comedy fans... while on the other I breathe a sigh of relief that at least his work will never get tainted by ghastly British attitudes. I'm proud to keep this book a secret and to only ever share it with close friends!"
- Champniss
NOMINEES
Clarke & Dawe on The 7.30 Report - 33.33%
His Generation by Shaun Micallef - 28.57%

Last year's winner:
Newstopia

Tony Martin's second book is a slightly different beast than the first. You wouldn't say it's more commercial - it's still a collection of low-key tales united by his keen sense of the absurd - but it does seem to have a few of the rough edges smoothed off compared to the first. In a way, it feels like a book from an author in transition, halfway between the guy with the collection of funny stories who wrote the first book and the author who can make anything funny that we'll see in his third book (if there is one). There's a lot more than can be said about A Nest of Occasionals, but the only really relevant one here is that it's the funniest Australian book of 2009.

Clarke & Dawe are just going to keep turning up here, aren't they? When we complain about the tragic state of Australian comedy, in a way it's all Clarke & Dawe's fault for making the good stuff seem so easy. Clearly it's not - otherwise everyone who wasn't Daryl Somers would be doing it. But once you get past the fact than John Clarke is a very funny and extremely insightful man, and that Bryan Dawe is as perfect an on-camera foil for him that you could ask for, there is still a case to be made that if more Australian comedians were able to get themselves small-scale timeslots where they could do whatever they wanted to, we'd see a lot more good comedy. Or just more of The Urban Monkey....

His Generation by Shaun Micallef is a freakin' comedy album! Who puts out a comedy album - a proper, sketches and songs comedy album - these days? It may not have been all new material, especially to those who've been following Micallef's career long-term, but the sheer fact that it exists is exciting enough. After all, at a time where improving technology should mean we're getting into a golden age of DIY audio comedy, all we seem to be getting is snippets of chat between commercials, and podcasts where rambling rants and long-winded chat is the final draft instead of the first. To have someone put out a comedy album that actually uses the format as more than a dumping ground for prank calls is cause for celebration. Also, it's pretty funny.

 Best New ComedyConclusion